Past Issues

Objective: We intended to study the association between the newly diagnosed amnestic disorders and dementia. Methods: We used a subset of Taiwan’s National Health Research Institute Database, containing one million randomly sampled subjects to identify 5,396 patients aged ≥ 20 years without a history of amnestic disorders. We enrolled 1,349 patients with newly diagnosed amnestic disorders, and propensity score-matched 4,047 controls for age, gender, demographic covariates, Charlson comorbidity index, and index-date at a ratio of 1: 3. After adjusting for confounding factors, we used Fine and Gray’s competing risk survival analysis to compare the risk of developing dementia of the two groups during a 10-year follow-up. Results: Of the study subjects, 440 in 1,349 (32.62%) developed dementia compared to 155 in 4,047 (3.83%) of the controls. The study subjects were signifi cantly to develop dementia (hazard ratio = 17.536, 95% confi dence interval = 14.487 - 21.226, p < 0.001). After adjusting for confounding factors, the HR for dementia was 16.531 (95% CI =13.611 - 20.078), which also signifi cantly different (p < 0.001). Amnestic disorders were signifi cantly associated with the increased risk of Alzheimer, vascular, senile and pre-senile, and alcoholic types of dementia (all p < 0.001) Conclusion: The patients with newly diagnosed amnestic disorder had a 16-fold increased risk of developing dementia.